Searching for a easy communication home automation system

Florent,

As I noted in my response to your email, I don't think Insteon is available yet for 230V/50Hz so you will likely need to concentrate on other systems.

Unless things have changed, Zensys wants a lot of money for their Z-Wave SDK. I'm not a fan of Z-Wave but there may be others here who can help.

There are Zigbee home automation devices but there are also some patent suits filed by Lutron against both Control4 (Zigbee based) and Leviton (Z-Wave based). You probably should avoid both until the lawsuits play out.

Have you c>Hi,

Thank you for your answer

We could use it with a 230V to 120V converter. It's a school school project, so if we can't use it our home, it's not really a problem. And Insteon is supposed to come in Europe, at the end of 2007 / beginning of 2008.

Yes, it's too expansive. But as I said, it's a school project, we won't sell it, so we don't really care about copyrights. If we can find a serial controller and a way to use it, that would be great.

I could'nt find any of them. Can you give me a website where to find them ? We are not really interested by ZigBee, but our school has a license, some chips and lots of projects have already been made on it (but few were really working).

I have a bad feeling about C-Bus. I think it's too high level protocol. That means that it will be more expansive. A very simple protocol might be better for this project.

Florent

Search this forum using "Insteon 50Hz". There were several messages from someone in India who was experimenting with Insteon in a closed laboratory system. I do not recall the details but think he had problems because of the

50Hz.

Here are some Zigbee l>Thank you for your answer

That's pretty annoying

There are some serial controllers :

I would prefer to use direct serial connection. But as I ask in my next topic : Will I be able to send the right commands, is it as simple as the Insteon's 2414S controller ?

Florent

I have no idea - I did not spend the thousands of dollars they wanted for their SDK and, if I had, I would not violate the license by telling you the protocols.

As I told you I'm not a fan of Z-Wave. I would assume that any serial controller would have a high level protocol for communicating with it if that's all you want to do. Just ask the vendor what software comes with the controller. That doesn't seem to be much of a student engineering project. For about $25 you can buy a programmable RF transceiver and listen to the RF communications between nodes.

But, as I said in your other thread, you need a controller that uses the

868MHz RF frequency used by Z-Wave in Europe. In N. America they use the 900MHz band.

"Florent Clairambault" wrote:

There is a much less expensive option than purchasing the original SDK.

Mr. Houston has never tried Z-Wave. He bears a personal grudge over matters entirely unrelated to Z-Wave against two people who sell it. He has also made several failed attempts at marketing X10 based products, which partly explains the bias. In all fairness, since I sell several lines of Z-Wave products I can't claim to be without bias either.

There are.

I certainly hope you meant to type "interested". :^)

HomeSeer sells a serial interface for Z-Wave.

In all "fairness":

Here's a link to that thread.

I can only speculate about why it did not work on 50Hz but suspect they use dead reckoning with a timer referenced to the previous ZC to start the

131.65kHz signal, which starts 800µS before ZC and continues for 1023µS after. The timing probably is based on the expected line frequency of 60Hz. You can see oscilloscope screenshots here that show the relationship between the signal and ZC - the picture labelled B shows it best. You can also see it diagrammed on p34 of the Insteon white paper at...

On Oct 9, 6:45 pm, "Florent Clairambault" > Our school can help us to use ZigBee, but it seems that there isn't any ZigBee product for home automation. And it seems to me it's too high level protocol (compared to the Z-Wave & Insteon protocols which seem really easy

Go to

and follow the links to the Zigbee modems. There is company that sells a Zigbee using the AT command set. You don't have to know anything about the Zigbee protocols when using their AT modem command set.

Nice idea - but costly for HA use. Here's a direct link...

Thank you for all the links.

You gave us a lot of information. We still don't know if Insteon works in

110V 50Hz, so maybe we will switch to Z-Wave if we can. And if you can't, we will try the ZigBee products...

Florent

Yes, I've seen. But can we use a simple protocol to reprogram it, and will it be compatible in Europe ?